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Startups Took Over Earth, and Now
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They’re Headed to Space — With

Creepy Pepsi Ads in Tow
CubeSats are already de ning the sky over your head

Vittoria Elliott Follow

Apr 25 · 7 min read

Illustration by Jon Han

ast November, Reuters released a bombshell report

detailing the location of 39 Muslim “reeducation”
camps in China’s Xinjiang province. Now widely
understood as detention centers perpetuating
serious human rights abuses, these camps had
expanded in secret for years. But for all its
restrictions, Beijing couldn’t hide them from a set of eyes hovering in
Lower Earth Orbit (LEO).

Reuters, in partnership with Earthrise Media, a company that licenses

satellite imagery to media, used photos from a constellation of some
120 CubeSats to document the otherwise impenetrable region. These
satellites aren’t the big ones you might be familiar with from high
school science class: CubeSats are barely bigger than a standard Rubik’s
Cube, and are relatively cheap to construct at around $50,000. (Full
satellite launches can cost tens of millions of dollars.)

CubeSats allow people to track natural disasters, document

deforestation, and monitor crop yields. As Futurism recently reported,
they might even enable a new kind of orbital advertising — just look at
the night sky for a sponsored message from Pepsi. (For its part, the soft
drink maker says it only tested the technology and has no current plans
to roll it out for marketing.)

In any event, these tiny satellites are on the brink of an innovation

explosion the world might not be ready for.

More than 1,000 CubeSats have been launched so far. The Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) expects that in the next few years,
as the space industry is estimated to grow eightfold, that number will
climb in an unprecedented way, with CubeSats collecting terabytes of
data on the world below.

. . .

he CubeSat was born in 1999 as part of a

partnership between professors Jordi Puig-Suari
and Bob Twiggs, of California Polytechnic State
University and Stanford University, respectively.
They wanted a way to help their students get
hands-on experience with satellite technology.

At the time, the process of building any satellite generally took several
years and millions of dollars — far too much time and money to waste
on students.

“If you worked on satellites, you maybe got to work on one or two your
whole career,” says Andy Erickson, director of global security at Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “It used to be a very slow
process and, as a student, you never got to work on real hardware.”

CubeSats quickly became an invaluable teaching tool for young

scientists and a boon to researchers who wanted to test out new
technologies, bolstering university space programs around the world.
Today, the same technological advancements that have allowed
smartphones and computers to become smaller and more efficient are
poised to allow exponential jumps in CubeSat technologies, and an
increasing push into space travel by private companies is opening a new
world of commercial interest in the mini-satellites.

One of the leaders in the world of commercial CubeSats is Planet Labs,

founded in Silicon Valley, startup style, out of a garage in Cupertino,
California. Planet has launched more than 350 CubeSats into LEO since
2010.

“Every three to six months, we have a new generation of the satellites,”

says Michael Safyan, vice president of launch at Planet Labs.
“Sometimes it’s an improvement on capabilities, like a new telescope,
or a reduction in the time it takes to manufacture.” At this point, Safyan
estimates that Planet can produce dozens of satellites per week.

A “1U” CubeSat without an outer layer of protection

Alone, a single CubeSat isn’t terribly powerful. The imaging power of

CubeSats is nowhere near the granularity of a billion-dollar satellite
like those used by the military. And because they’re so small, there’s no
way to build in redundancy, meaning that if one component breaks, the
whole CubeSat quickly becomes useless. But what CubeSats lack in
size, they make up for in numbers, cheapness, and ease of deployment.

“A constellation of CubeSats gives you some congregant capability that

one big system doesn’t give us,” says Air Force Captain Michael Nayak,
a scientist with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory whose work
focuses on space and planetary science. “From a defense perspective, if
you have a constellation of CubeSats, you can take out a few of them
and you’ll still be able to gather data effectively.”

For its part, Planet has a swarm of 120 CubeSats that image Earth every
single day. But the most valuable thing about a constellation of
CubeSats is the data they’re capable of collecting, and the machine
learning that can analyze all of it.

Satellite imagery from CubeSats can help NGOs track humanitarian

crises or assist scientists monitoring the effects of climate change. In
identifying China’s Muslim internment camps, Earthrise Media used
satellite images provided by Planet Labs’ CubeSats, among other
sources.

The “democratization” of space technology by

commercial entities also means that private
companies now get a say in who gets access to the
data collected from space.

Countries that don’t have billions to invest in a space program can use
data from commercial CubeSats to monitor crops or extreme weather.
And private companies, especially those in the commodities world, can
infer valuable information about everything from agricultural yields to
power plant productivity by analyzing satellite imagery. Images from
satellites monitoring, say, a crop like corn, allow commodities traders
to see what’s growing where — weeks before a USDA report on crop
yields would normally be released.

But commercial entities’ “democratization” of space technology also

means that private companies now get a say in who gets access to the
data collected from space. “At one point in time, this kind of technology
was controlled by nation states, mostly the U.S. and the Soviet Union,”
says Brian Weeden, PhD, of the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit
that works to promote peaceful and sustainable use of space. Now,
instead of the U.S. government deciding who gets access to the
information picked up by a satellite, it’s likely to be a company like
Planet, which Safyan says has its own internal review process about
which clients it works with.

But leaving these decisions up to private companies has some worrying

implications.
“There’s no control, say, on where a company’s venture funding comes
from,” says Captain Nayak. “There’s nothing stopping, say, a foreign
government [from] coming in and being a venture backer for a CubeSat
company and then wanting access to that data.” Though he couldn’t say
this has already happened with CubeSats, Nayak offered the example
of the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, which has received funding
from China, Canada, Japan, and India.

While certain information, like the imaging of a U.S military base, is

off-limits for a commercial company to sell, machine learning like the
kind Planet is pioneering can process terabytes of data on a daily basis,
allowing for near real-time imaging of nearly everything else.

“Countries that are very restrictive of citizens [could] be able to obtain

information about people’s movements, and that could be very hard to
control,” says Erickson.

An analysis of CubeSat imaging could, for example, tell how crowded a

parking lot is at certain times of day — valuable intel for both an
investor and someone trying to plan a high-impact terrorist attack.
 An older photograph of Disneyland’s parking lot taken by one of Planet Labs’ Dove CubeSats

For now, the major factor slowing the deployment of CubeSats is the
limited ability to get them into space. NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative
(CSLI) allows CubeSats built by schools and nonprofit organizations to
hitch a ride as auxiliary payloads on government rockets, but waiting
time for space on a rocket can sometimes take a year or more. Even
though companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin continue to expand
opportunities for launching CubeSats, a satellite can sit on the shelf for
months or even a year before getting put into orbit.

Still, while space is certainly not lawless — international treaties and

national laws govern much of the world’s peaceful extraterrestrial
activities — we have already begun to see the ways in which regulating
and tracking the ever-increasing number of satellites poses a challenge.
Especially as the satellites themselves get even smaller.
 In December 2017, California startup Swarm Technologies, which
hopes to provide mobile phone and internet service to remote areas,
had its application to launch four experimental SpaceBEE satellites
denied by the FCC. The government was concerned that the
SpaceBEEs, which are tinier than the smallest CubeSats, were too small
for government satellites to track, risking a collision with other
satellites.

That should have made the mission a no-go, but Swarm launched
anyway, from a SpaceX rocket that took off from India. The company’s
aggressiveness paid off financially — a year later, Swarm announced it
had closed on a $25 million round of Series A venture funding, handily
dwarfing the $900,000 fine the FCC levied against the group for its
launch.

And while the U.S. Space Surveillance Network can track most objects
in LEO — probably even these new SpaceBEEs — figuring out what a
satellite is monitoring and who it belongs to is far trickier. To that end,
scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are starting to work
towards one solution: Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier
(ELROI), a sort of satellite license plate that would indicate the type of
satellite, the satellite’s owner, and its orbital path.

For now, experts say the Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive-
3 is a positive step. Released in June 2018, it designates the
Department of Commerce, as opposed to the Department of Defense,
as the entity to oversee private space activities like CubeSats, meaning
that it also has the power to put into place key regulations. Still, it
means the government is playing catch-up.

“It’s behind the times,” says Erickson. “All this stuff wasn’t available to
masses, and we’re getting to that point of availability, and we have to
start to think about it.”

As CubeSats and other small satellites become more powerful — and

even more ubiquitous — they’ll be able to gather ever more granular
data about what’s going on below. When that happens, forget intrusive
ad tracking or sketchy facial recognition: You’ll want to keep your eyes
on the sky.